Search Results for: in a word

Zoology

Reponse of a 10-year-old child invited to write an essay about a bird and a beast:

The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.

I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a mammal. It has six sides — right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass.

— Ernest Gowers and Sir Bruce Fraser, The Complete Plain Words, 1973

| Humor · Science & Math

Memoranda

Excerpts from the literary notebooks of Thomas Hardy:

  • “Loughborough used to say, ‘Do what you think right, & never think of what you are going to say to excuse it beforehand.’ — a good maxim.”
  • “Bonaparte had not the patience requisite for defensive operations, said Wellington.”
  • “Miracles, scriptural & ecclesiastical — how make a difference?”
  • “Brahms – The individual character of his ideas. … With him beauty seems to hold a place subordinate to expression.” [Grove Dictionary of Music]
  • “‘Be it so; then minimize pain.’ Words of Jeremy Bentham when his physician told him he was about to die.” [F.R.E. Dowden]
  • “Epicurean philosophy – always in vogue in declining & sickly states.” [Life of Virgil]
  • “Indirect road to honour. Virgil’s introduction to Octavius was because of his reputation as a horse doctor.”
  • “Caesar, & Brutus, tampered with the muses. Poems curiously bound, & lodged in the most famous libraries; but neither the sacredness of those places, nor the greatness of their names, cd. preserve ill poetry.”
  • “You will find, perhaps to your surprise, that nine-tenths of all human suffering endured by men is useless.” [Tolstoy]
  • “Swift says some men know books as others do lords: learn their titles & then boast of their acquaintance with them.”
  • “Like all persons who have looked a great deal at human life, Balzac had been greatly struck by most people’s selfishness.” [Henry James]
  • “A fair test of the value of an institution is this — Supposing it did not exist, should we set about to establish it?” [Montague Cookson]
  • “It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies & to end as superstitions.” [Thomas Huxley]
  • “The scientific spirit is of more value than its products; & irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors” [Huxley]
  • “The artist may be known rather by what he omits.” [Schiller]
  • “Nothing is so great as it seems beforehand.” [George Eliot]

“‘He who has to act on his own responsibility is a slave if he does not act on his own judgment.’ Saying of Sir H. Edwardes — highly valued by Livingstone.”

| Literature

Narrow Meaning

https://archive.org/details/strand-1899-v-18/page/238/mode/2up?view=theater

Reader J. William Hook submitted this curiosity to the Strand in August 1899. Holding the page level with the eyes foreshortens the characters and reveals a love poem:

Art thou not dear unto my heart?
Oh, I search that heart and see
And from my bosom tear the part
That beats not true to thee.

But to my bosom thou art dear,
More dear than words can tell,
And if a fault be cherished there,
‘Tis loving thee too well.

There seems to have been a little vogue for this kind of thing — C. Field submitted a similar image three months later.

| Oddities · Poems

Small Talk

(Until William Herschel’s advances in telescopes, stars seemed to have “rays” or “tails.”)

At a dinner given by Mr Aubert in the year 1786, William Herschel was seated next to Mr Cavendish, who was reputed to be the most taciturn of men. Some time passed without his uttering a word, then he suddenly turned to his neighbour and said: ‘I am told that you see the stars round, Dr Herschel’. ‘Round as a button’, was the reply. A long silence ensued till, towards the end of the dinner, Cavendish again opened his lips to say in a doubtful voice: ‘Round as a button?’ ‘Exactly, round as a button’, repeated Herschel, and so the conversation ended.

— Constange A. Lubbock, The Herschel Chronicle, 1933

| Science & Math · Society

The Engine

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Engine_(Gulliver).png

Gulliver’s Travels describes a device by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”:

He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me ‘to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.’ The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

As it permutes sets of words, it’s arguably a forerunner of the modern computer.

| Literature · Technology

Fundamentals

In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply:

A Poet’s Advice to Students

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

(From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct. 26, 1955.)

| Literature · Society

“Good and Clever”

If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.

But somehow ’tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should,
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever, so rude to the good!

So friends, let it be our endeavour
To make each by each understood;
For few can be good, like the clever,
Or clever, so well as the good.

— Elizabeth Wordsworth

| Poems

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_Johnson_EMWEA.jpg

  • Dante’s 1305 essay “De vulgari eloquentia” contains a 27-letter word, sovramagnificentissimamente, “supermagnificently.”
  • Life Savers candies were invented by Hart Crane’s father.
  • 2746 = 2 + \sqrt{7\sqrt{4}}^{6} (Colin Rose)
  • RETROSUSCEPTION is an anagram of COUNTERRIPOSTES.
  • “Of all the reciprocals of integers, the one that I best like is 1/0 for it is a titan amongst midgets.” — Sam Linial

Lord David Cecil called Samuel Johnson “an outstanding example of the charm that comes from an unexpected combination of qualities. In general, odd people are not sensible and sensible people are not odd. Johnson was both and often both at the same time.”

| Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

“A ‘Religious’ Fish”

https://books.google.com/books?id=P_6Z7ooR98IC&pg=PA1124

Describing this fish (Holocanthus Alternaus), which was caught off Zanzibar, a correspondent of the ‘Times of India’ wrote: ‘… On the one side of the tail are the words, La-ilaha-illa Allah’ — ‘There is no God but God.’ On the other side, ‘Shan Allah’ — ‘God’s Work,’ or ‘An Act of God.’ … Many of our readers who know Arabic will be able to see for themselves from this untouched photograph that the fish is a devout Moslem.’ We have shown the photographs to an expert in this country, who informs us that the letters are certainly intended to represent Arabic characters, but that there is nothing sufficiently distinguishable to enable it to be said that they mean what they are alleged to mean. A further opinion is expressed that the ‘inscriptions’ may not be genuine.

— Illustrated London News, Dec. 28, 1929

| Oddities